Don’t know them. What I meant was that Epic has to cater to the 95% of their customers who are on Windows because all the games and developer tools are on Windows too.
Edit: yup exactly my point, the vast majority of those devs are on Windows.
If the tools are only on Windows, the where else would the users come from? If you don’t branch out, you’ll never have any users except the ones you already cater to. Epic made the post 2 yrs ago that Linux was going to be a first class member of the family. I didn’t make it. They shouldn’t have said it if they didn’t really mean it.
Well of course, it’s the chicken and egg problem we’ve always had. I’m just realistic about the situation. Also I’m not sure how developing on linux would accomplish much if you still need to cater mostly to a Windows crowd. It’s unfortunate but people aren’t going to suddenly use linux. Unless maybe MS messes up in an unprecedentedly horrible way, which i doubt 
MS made WIN 10 free with future updates in an way, there are looking for alternative money making model, and they look at Play store & iOS store, they think whoa O.o, we had the best resources but we could not monetized in that way, Imagine people’s were buying all the software & games through win store and the commission would make skyrocket their earnings. The problem is they had been conservative and need to learn from google’s freemium earning models 
Anyone remember the awesome windows live for games? That was pure amazing it allowed you to not only no longer play your games but it also made your purchase of said games a waste of money, gotta love microsoft for that. really bolsters customers confidence.
You guys may laugh at me when I suggest this, but if someone files a petition on the “we the people” White House website, and it gets 100K signatures within 30 days, then the oval house has to look at it. and is required to provide a response. Unreal Engine has over a million users, add in every Unity and CryEngine developer as well as every gamer, and we could get the signatures required, but there would have to be an organized concerted effort to ensure meeting the requirement within 30 days of posting the petition. In other words, don’t just go post a petition and email your friends. This would require talking to media outlets and spearheading a timely release. Lastly, the petition would have to be on point and have a clear argument.
Achievable? Of course. We know most people here are dying to bend the ear of the POTUS.
Cheers,
Sterling
My thoughts exactly. The thing is, this is OUR DECISION to make. UE4 is a middleware platform for making games, Epic should not decide WHERE we port our games to. Epic can advise that and make us aware of that, it would be fine and even welcome because it is a fair question. But not deciding for us; This is a move that is made thinking about themselves as a single game developer, not as a game engine representing the industry. For me, developers should have the power to choose from any platform. You see, maybe I have a business plan for my studio and want to take advantage of the low competition on Windows Phone Market, or any other platform. Maybe I believe some platform will grow a lot in the future and I want to pioneer in it, while few people are paying attention. But UE4 does not support it. Once I participated in a UE4 oficial event, “Gets Unreal”, and asked about the Windows Phone support. They replied “Who has Windows Phone?”. This is not a good posture from a game engine company. They should support every possibility to the developer, as long as it is viable. Of course not everything can be supported, but UWP can be a major thing, a great opportunity for developers… but Epic is choosing for us?
I don’t support this.
I think I am missing something… UE4 created games run on a variety of platforms / distribution systems… Epic is not forcing us down any path… What are you suggesting here…??
teak
My concern is only that Epic is choosing which platforms should support or not for us. One thing is if they said “No, it’s not viable to support this platform for X reason”. That would be kinda fine (although Unity supports, so why couldn’t Unreal?). But Epic has some issues with Microsoft. They don’t support Windows Phone, and now they so far won’t support UWP. Why? Because it’s best for us as developers? Microsoft won’t simply get monopoly over the entire industry, they are trying to do that for so long and never got there.
My point is simple: I believe the engine should empower the developer to choose. And that could affect support, for example. Monopoly for monopoly, Steam does it on the PC. If your game doesn’t pass Greenlight, how are you going to monetize on PC? That’s not monopoly?
Saying they should support ‘every’ platform is really quite naive - supporting platforms costs a lot of money; if Epic don’t believe they can make a sufficient return on support for a given platform, then they won’t support it because it isn’t worth the expense on their behalf. Windows Phone is one of those platforms.
You do however have the source code. If you think it’s worth supporting a given platform and you can make that return, you can take that risk - otherwise your argument is basically ‘I want you to spend the money on my risky venture, because I don’t want to accept that risk’. I can’t recall who, but as an example one company ported an older version of UE to work on the Nintendo DS, as an example.
Well the thread is about UWP. No support for it means you can’t publish UWP apps for Xbox One, , Windows phones, tablets and desktop. Possibly even more in future.
But if MS would close the system to third party, can’t they be hit legally based on their monopoly as happened back in the browser wars? I mean origin, Steam, GoG, UbiSoft must have vested interest that PC stays an open platform. I mean looking at it this way: There is always a way to go back to Win 8.1. Which still has official support and is open as it always was.
Ahh… I see now. I don’t remember anything saying they would not support it… I do know, Epic has an opinion on the direction MS is taking. Not sure why anyone (at this point) would support UWP… Lack of user base compared to steam, locked in to a single environment, etc.
teak
UE4 does not support the WiiU… So, if you are a developer wanting to support that platform, you would find another engine. Epic is not forcing you to do anything…
teak
Yes. I suppose you’re right on this one. We all have a lot of options at our disposal.
UWP is a form of platform lock-in - it is the only reason that it exists in it’s current form.
You might not be able to make a UWP app, but you can still build for Xbox One and PC. Neither Windows Phones (save perhaps the newest Lumias) nor really has the hardware to support UE4 properly, so in that sense it’s kind of redundant.
maxihori wrote: “try to imagine what would happen if unity reach Unreal in terms of graphical quality.”
thats why I (partly) switched back to Unity3d … there is the poss. way unity3d-visualstudio-xboxone …
(i have tried to get the xbox dev tool for unreal engine but these way of epic games
“Thank you for filling out the UE4 Console Access Request (regarding the xbox dev tools) form. Once we have received confirmation of your developer status (ms dev) we will reach back out to you to continue the sign up process.”
is very complex - u exactly have to know what u intend and to describe your ideas (in a very early stage) to ms.)
but … i will open a thread “UE - visual studio - xbox one” - maybe the way is possible.
best, stef
Well I listed you a bunch of platforms which user base combined is not that small and the audience is different compared to places in like Steam. Some people like to take advantage of non saturated markets like the guy who you originally replied to.
Yes, but Epic is not those people. As far as Epic is concerned, the audience is too small.
Yeah I’m aware of that but UWP for Xbox One means for example you can run the game on your own console today without being registered developer. In future it could possibly also mean you can get your games reached by Xbox users through the Windows marketplace. For the hardware support I’m not sure where are you actually referring as the support for all the platforms come with UWP itself and rest is just optimizing memory use, shader complexity, etc. to get running on lower-end hardware.